Small Angle Scattering in Neutron Imaging—A Review

Conventional neutron imaging utilizes the beam attenuation caused by scattering and absorption through the materials constituting an object in order to investigate its macroscopic inner structure. Small angle scattering has basically no impact on such images under the geometrical conditions applied. Nevertheless, in recent years different experimental methods have been developed in neutron imaging, which enable to not only generate contrast based on neutrons scattered to very small angles, but to map and quantify small angle scattering with the spatial resolution of neutron imaging. This enables neutron imaging to access length scales which are not directly resolved in real space and to investigate bulk structures and processes spanning multiple length scales from centimeters to tens of nanometers

Phase-contrast imaging and tomography at 60 keV using a conventional x-ray tube source

Phase-contrast imaging at laboratory-based x-ray sources using grating interferometers has been developed over the last few years for x-ray energies of up to 28 keV. Here, we show first phase-contrast projection and tomographic images recorded at significantly higher x-ray energies, produced by an x-ray tube source operated at 100 kV acceleration voltage. We find our measured tomographic phase images in good agreement with tabulated data. The extension of phase-contrast imaging to this significantly higher x-ray energy opens up many applications of the technique in medicine and industrial nondestructive testing

Implementation and assessment of the black body bias correction in quantitative neutron imaging.

We describe in this paper the experimental procedure, the data treatment and the quantification of the black body correction: an experimental approach to compensate for scattering and systematic biases in quantitative neutron imaging based on experimental data. The correction algorithm is based on two steps; estimation of the scattering component and correction using an enhanced normalization formula. The method incorporates correction terms into the image normalization procedure, which usually only includes open beam and dark current images (open beam correction). Our aim is to show its efficiency and reproducibility: we detail the data treatment procedures and quantitatively investigate the effect of the correction. Its implementation is included within the open source CT reconstruction software MuhRec. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using simulated and experimental CT datasets acquired at the ICON and NEUTRA beamlines at the Paul Scherrer Institut